A Promising Piece of the Puzzle: Human Dignity and the Role of Section 1 of the Charter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this brief piece, I want to take up Major’s invitation to think about the “puzzle” and the “promise” of human dignity, but from a different perspective. In particular, I want to consider whether any negative implications of adopting a conception of human dignity that encompasses the elderly offender who is sentenced to die in prison can be rationalized within the broader constitutional framework. My suggestion is that the tension relating to the “young” and “elderly” offenders may be better addressed by focusing on the role of section 1 of the Charter. While that provision received negligible mention in Bissonnette, it may be used to justify sentencing elderly offenders to effectively die in prison for heinous crimes like murder because any other approach would fail to adequately deter others, who are similarly situated, from committing such crimes. As I explain, this framework falls back on early recognition by the Supreme Court that utilitarian arguments for increasing punishment are properly considered as justifications, under section 1, for imposing what are otherwise “cruel and unusual treatments or punishments.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".